The Reader

"If people like you don't learn from what happened to people like me then what the hell is the point of anything."

That Holocaust-related line, a microcosm of the entire movie, comes from a very Jewish professor halfway through The Reader. If you miss to absorb that point, you won't appreciate the message that the movie is trying to tell. Actually you probably wouldn't appreciate the movie at all.

In Germany in the Summer of 1958, 15 year-old Michael Berg spends most of the first third of the movie naked, having a cold sexual affair with an equally naked 36 year-old Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet). The age difference is considerable, and while it may have some significance (haven't thought about it too much yet), that's not the main point. The affair is abruptly extinguished, and years later an adult Michael happens to see Hanna's trial-- accused of atrocities when she was an SS guard in the Holocaust. Michael knows a secret that may exonerate her, but to reveal it would also be to reveal their taboo relationship.

Ok, up to this point was the part of the movie I enjoyed. After that, the in-between-the-lines started to overwhelm the lines themselves. Hanna is found guilty and receives a life sentence in jail. Many years later, Michael attempts to reconnect with her in some way by sending her recordings of himself reading books and notes, just as he read to her during their affair. Based on the tapes, she learns to read and begins to write letters back, which go unanswered.

See, her illiteracy is a metaphor for... something. Perhaps her inability to understand the gravity of the atrocities that were committed in the Holocaust. She was definitely guilty, by the way, at least to a certain extent. Learning to read while suffering in jail for her crimes is another symbol for gaining understanding. And if I keep talking about it with the benefit of having been thinking about it for the past few hours I run the risk of making it sound better than it really is.

The second half of the movie is heavy handed and boring and made me forget how much I appreciated the first half. As merely a movie it makes no narrative sense. As an allegory for German guilt it may be brilliant, but to look at it in such a light requires such detachment from the reality of events on screen that I'd find myself no long applauding the movie itself but merely my ability to untangle its buried themes.

The Reader surprised people the most by getting an Oscar nomination for Best Picture. And now, having seen all five nominees, I totally agree. There are more deserving movies, yes, like The Dark Knight or WALL-E-- far more mainstream and accessible movies, but why not? Oscar nominations are not just for movies like The Reader, which have their meaning buried deep under layer upon layer of heavy intellectual metaphor. Makes a review of the movie useless because the only types of people that would be satisfied by it are the ones that would rather be doing the reviewing. As for me, I'd rather watch a movie to be entertained, or maybe enlightened-- not just given another way to be confused.

Milk

Gay gay gay.

Milk is an appropriately gay name for the flamboyantly bubbly gay man that is Harvey Milk, a gay rights activist who became the first openly gay man elected to public office in the history of the universe when he was elected to the Board of Supervisors in-- where else-- San Francisco.

The idea is that your heart should be inspired by this marginalized homosexual valiantly overcoming adversity. Is it working? Let me dampen your spirits though: His electoral win was largely due a 1976 change in election rules, when San Francisco decided to choose supervisors from districts rather than a city-wide vote. Milk's district was the fruitiest district of America's most liberal city, so basically the only constituents he had to convince were the hippies and the gays. His closest opponent was another gay man.

The highlight of his political career is his campaign against an initiative to ban homosexuals from schools. As Supervisor he crosses paths with Dan White, a social conservative who doesn't seem to be a bigot but has a difficult working relationship with Milk. I don't think it's a spoiler for me to say that Milk is assassinated by White, and indeed the movie gets this out of the way by announcing it through news footage at the very beginning.

I feel like I'm using the word "gay" too much. Yeah, well, this movie is very gay. Super gay. And if even if you think you'd be ok with that, the first half of Milk will test your limits. It has a sort of claustrophobic atmosphere, trapped in this unworldly bubble where all the gays are wildly promiscuous, and everyone is gay. With the exception of the mayor, all the straight people with screen time are portrayed as villainous crusaders against the gay.

Despite supposedly being an inspiration, Harvey Milk doesn't seem like that much of a nice guy either. He picks up bozos from the streets to have casual bedroom rendezvous that turn into shallow long term relationships. His political stands use strawman arguments and logical cloudiness. And honestly he was kind of a dick to Dan White. What's annoying is that, despite the movie portraying all of this, he's still painted as a saint.

Sean Penn is a great actor, and in this movie he acts nothing like Sean Penn, and it's just annoying. He puts out a great performance but it's not fun to watch. Just like in I Am Sam, he puts out this nasally whine that haunts my ears well after the movie ended.

Despite its technical achievement, the whole movie just seemed disingenuous to me. Like it was trying to find a cohesive narrative where one didn't really exist. Milk wasn't even assassinated because he was gay, it was just because of some frivolous politics.

Roger Ebert called Milk the best movie of the year. His opinions are always worth listening to, but as for this... Ehh. I don't get it.

Slumdog Millionaire quotes Wikipedia

This is what I get for prowling Wikipedia while watching movies.

In Slumdog Millionaire, the tour guides at the Taj Mahal are reading lines from the Wikipedia article on the Taj Mahal. It's heard as ambient noise when the main characters first wander in:

• ...the Taj Mahal is considered the finest example of Mughal architecture...
• ...during the birth of their fourteenth child...
• ...was completed around 1648...
• ...a labour force of twenty thousand workers...
• ...became a UNESCO World Heritage Site and was cited as "the jewel of...

All those lines are found in the Wikipedia article, and all are heard within a span of 20 seconds about a third of the way into the movie.

You could be tempted to suspect that Wikipedia is the one that is, in fact, quoting Slumdog Millionaire. However, all these lines were in the old Wikipedia article from November 2007, before the movie began filming.

Also of note: The current article says the Taj Mahal "was completed around 1653". That was a change made in November 2008. The old version of the article says 1648, and that's what is quoted in the movie.

The movie was great, by the way, and I'll give my thoughts on it sometime. I just wanted to get this post out first because I couldn't find any other blog or news article that makes note of it. Probably because I'm the only one that does this. Someone should just release a media player for me that displays wikilinked subtitles.